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Religious and political symbols in Unicode
Characters representing cultural, political and religious symbols From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Unicode contains a number of characters that represent various cultural, political, and religious symbols. Most, but not all, of these symbols are in the Miscellaneous Symbols block.
The majority of them are treated as graphic symbols that are not characters. [1] Exceptions to this include characters in certain writing systems that are also in use as political or religious symbols, such as 卐 (U+5350), the swastika encoded as a Chinese character (although it is also encoded as a religious symbol at U+0FD5); or ॐ (U+0950), the Om symbol which is, strictly speaking, a Devanagari ligature. A special case is ﷲ (U+FDF2), which is a special ligature of Arabic script used only for writing of the word Allah. This ligature is in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which was only encoded for compatibility and is not recommended for use in regular Arabic text.[2]
Unicode defines the semantics of a character by its character identity and its normative properties, one of these being the character's general category, given as a two-letter code (e.g. Lu for "uppercase letter"). Characters that fall in the "political or religious" category are given the "general category" So, which is the catch-all category for "Symbol, other", i.e. anything considered a "symbol" which does not fall in any of the three other categories of Sm (mathematical symbols), Sc (currency symbols) or Sk (phonetic modifier symbols, i.e. IPA signs not considered letters).[3]
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Armenian block
The Unicode chart for the Armenian block notes two religious symbols:[4]
Dingbats block
The Dingbats block also contains some symbols with political/religious connotations:[5]
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Geometric Shapes Extended
Other weights of the Greek cross are in Geometric Shapes Extended.
Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block
The Unicode chart for the Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block notes several symbols used for Chinese folk religion:[6]
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Miscellaneous Symbols block
The Unicode chart for the Miscellaneous Symbols block has a section explicitly labelled "Religious and political symbols":[7]
Elsewhere in the block is:
The emoji variants have U+FE0F after the symbol.
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Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block
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The Unicode chart for the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block notes many religious symbols:[8]
Ostensibly religious symbols are, however, not limited to this section, as the same chart has another short section of two characters labelled "Syriac cross symbols", with the explanatory gloss "These symbols are used in liturgical texts of Syriac-speaking churches". Another short section of two symbols is headed "Medical and healing symbols", including U+2624 ☤ Caduceus (cf. U+1F750 🝐 "alchemical symbol for caduceus"), U+2695 ⚕ Staff of Aesculapius, and U+2625 ☥ Ankh, all of which originate in polytheistic religious traditions.[8]
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Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block
The Unicode chart for the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block notes one religious symbol":[9]
Tibetan block
The Unicode chart for the Tibetan block notes several religious symbols and a political symbol:[10]
Soyombo block
The Soyombo symbol is a special character in the Soyombo alphabet devised for the Mongolian language. It appears in several flags of Mongolia. Three forms appear in the Soyombo block.
See also
National flags are implemented by Regional indicator symbols in the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block.
References
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